Partner of the Week: Career Services

Congratulations to our first Web Accessibility Partner of the Week: Career Services!

Director Shelly Robinson and her Career Services department faced a problem common to many of us. They wanted to use the posters produced by our Creative Services department on their Web site. The posters are beautiful and brighten up a Web page. But they are heavy on text – too much for the alternate text, which we like to keep to the length of a Tweet (140 characters).

The Dilemma & The Solution

How do we make sure that someone who cannot see the poster will get all of the necessary information from it, while we still keep the pretty image on our Web page?

The solution Career Services came up with is simple: Create a post with all of the text from the image so that everyone has access to the information.

Then contact Creative Services and ask for an image to go along with that post! And, if the poster or postcard is compelling and you want to allow someone to print it, then provide the PDF version as a supplemental download!

That’s the way Career Services is handling all of the flyers and posters included on their Web site, now, and it’s something that you can do on your site as well!

It’s a win for our visitors who have images turned off in their browsers, a win for those who have images turned on, a win for Career Services and a win for our Web Accessibility efforts!

“We Could Not Do This Without You” Award.

We have said this before. We will say it again. We are encouraged by the way the Purdue University Calumet campus community as a whole has embraced the efforts to make our Web presence accessible to everyone. As our content editors continue to discover, it’s easy to get there with just a few “Standards” :

Adding meaningful alternate text to images;

Using headings and lists instead of bold paragraphs;

Adding extra information to tables;

Thinking of links as signposts, telling a visitor where they are about to go.

And sometimes, putting aside “the way we have always done things”, as Career Services did in this instance.

Next Friday, we’ll recognize another Web Accessibility Partner of the Week and provide you with another tip as we all work together to make the Purdue Calumet Web site accessible to everyone!

Purdue University Calumet

If you have trouble accessing this page because of a disability, please contact Marketing & Communications at marketing@purduecal.edu.

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